I'm Forbes' NY tech staff writer covering tech and advertising on the real best coast. Send tips and thoughts to akonrad@forbes.com. I previously served as Forbes' homepage editor for six months and reported before that at Fortune Magazine. I've written interviews for "The Leonard Lopate Show" on WNYC public radio and also served as a regional manager for a test prep company along the way. My love of startups and all things tech began at Harvard, where I incongruously studied medieval history and archaeology. Follow me on Twitter: @alexrkonrad

From iPhone To Mac, Convertro's Data Matches Where You See It To Where You Buy

You see a great deal for a coat or cheap flight on your iPhone, but it’s too big a purchase to make right away. After mulling it over and bored at work, you pull the trigger and buy it during your lunch hour.

CEO Jeffrey Zwelling wants to know which device you used to buy that flight and why. (Image credit: Convertro)

For brands and marketers, that sequence is exciting—but problematic. On the one hand, mobile advertising remains an emerging area for finding consumers. With online giants such as Facebook consistently declaring their focus on the mobile space amid doubts of their effectiveness, there’s a lot of room for growth. At the same time, it’s still difficult to put a finger on how brands can really make money of their marketing dollars thrown at your phone.

One major way for advertisers to feel more confident and justify greater spend is through customer path tracking, which has been an obsession of serial entrepreneur Jeffrey Zwelling, co-founder and CEO of Convertro, a marketing solutions provider in ‘Silicon Beach,’ the growing tech scene in Santa Monica, Calif. Zwelling’s company has quietly offered advanced user matching to its clients like Bonobos, True Religion and 1-800-Flowers for a few months, but is discussing how it works for the first time with FORBES.

“Four years ago, my main concern was tracking from your home [personal computer] to your work PC,” Zwelling says. “You would see an incredible surge of orders on Monday during business hours, because people would research over the weekend, talk to their wives, then make the purchase quietly at work.”

Convertro tackled that problem and figured out how to link purchases on one computer to their initial exposure, then applied that to going cross-device with mobile phones, where the need is great—for one recent campaign in major league sports, Zwelling says, mobile drove 40% of traffic but only earned 5% of its actual conversions.

The key to what Convertro does is big data, and Zwelling maintains a team of veteran data engineers, many veterans of security giant RSA, in the company’s Israeli office. The company uses that data to track user behaviors across devices—your phone, your tablet, your computers—building up a massive database of consumer activity that allows it to then determine how anonymous users are behaving. If no one is making purchases based on ads they see on phones, the brand will know. And if they are buying a lot of clothes but making the actual purchase on their computers, brands won’t freak out about spending on mobile ads, either. The tool works best with purchases big enough to take some consideration–the kind that you’d discuss with your partner or friends and not make all at once.

That’s why it’s crucial for someone like Antonio Guzman, digital marketing manager at custom suit company Indochino, to use path matching of users to know how he’s reaching shoppers. Indochino sends out emails to subscribers and previous purchasers as well as markets across digital. The company has tools to track how users behave when on the company website, but uses Convertro’s matching to see how effective its emails and ad dollars are perfoming.

“Part of it is justifying where you are spending your money and why,” Guzman says. “We make budgeting decisions based on what channels are working well, and to get a confirmation to turn the lights on.”

Convertro is not the only company providing tools to help marketers reach you on mobile, but Zwelling likes to think he has a built up a big head start with his data. The company’s been tracking user pathways since its inception over three years ago, and reached a critical mass for cross-device research in mid-2011. It has logged coffee shops like Starbucks, libraries and university computer systems across the country to remove them from its tracking because those locations’ many public users can muddy the waters, allowing each match to have over 80% confidence.

Leading alternatives like hot ad tech company Drawbridge, which is backed by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, use probability matching to achieve quicker but lower accuracy. (Drawbridge said in November that it can match up with 60-70% accuracy; Zwelling says his engineers are more impressed by Drawbridge’s audience-predicting ability, which they believe can find ideal audiences on a new device with an exact match of 20%.)

Like many players in ad tech, Zwelling is quick to note that his company respects user privacy: “we don’t track people, we just track their interactions as individual click trails. We don’t know who they are.”

For brands who want to see how their ad spend across devices compares, knowing your name doesn’t matter. What’s more important is that tools like Convertro’s advanced user matching can tell whether your pricey mobile ads are paying off or whether sales are actually better with an old-school cable television spot. The answer is in the data.

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